Paula P. Schnurr, PhD

Executive Director, National Center for Posttraumatic
Stress Disorder, Department of Veterans Affairs

Dr. Paula Schnurr is a psychologist who is the Executive Director of the National Center for Posttraumatic Stress Disorder and had previously served as Deputy Executive Director of the Center since 1989. She is a Professor of Psychiatry at the Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth and Editor of the Clinician’s Trauma Update-Online. She received her PhD in Experimental Psychology at Dartmouth College in 1984 and then completed a postdoctoral fellowship in the Department of Psychiatry at the Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth. Dr. Schnurr is Past-President of the International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies and is a fellow of the American Psychological Association. She previously served as Editor of the Journal of Traumatic Stress. She has won a number of awards, including the Health Breakthrough Award from Good Housekeeping Magazine for her research on the treatment of PTSD in female Veterans, and both the Lifetime Achievement Award and the Scientific Achievement Award from the International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies.

Dr. Schnurr has investigated risk and resilience factors associated with the long-term physical and mental health outcomes of exposure to traumatic events. She also has contributed to the development and validation of the most widely-used measures of PTSD, such as the Clinician-Administered PTSD Scale and the PTSD Checklist. She is an expert on psychotherapy research and has conducted a number of clinical trials of PTSD treatment, including multi-site trials of Prolonged Exposure for female veterans and 11 active duty personnel with PTSD and group psychotherapy for PTSD in Vietnam veterans. Her most recent multi-site trial was a comparative effectiveness trial of Prolonged Exposure and Cognitive Processing Therapy in male and female Veterans.